The Attorney General makes voting rights the test case of his tenure.

Eric Holder’s office is a civil-rights shrine. At the Department of Justice building, in Washington, he conducts meetings in a vast conference room, where he sits beneath a portrait of Robert F. Kennedy, one of his predecessors as Attorney General, who used the sprawling space as his office. According to Justice Department lore, Kennedy placed his desk in this room because J. Edgar Hoover presided in a similarly sized chamber on the other side of the fifth floor. Holder put his desk in a modest room in the corner of the building, where the place of honor belongs to a portrait of Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who was Attorney General during the Johnson Administration. Katzenbach played a leading role in the integration of the University of Alabama, where one of the first African-American students was a woman named Vivian Malone. Holder later married Sharon Malone, Vivian’s younger sister.

In five years as the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, Holder has engaged in few of the morally clear-cut struggles that helped define the Kennedy and Katzenbach eras; and he hasn’t enjoyed the victories that his predecessors could claim. He failed in his effort to bring the alleged masterminds of the 9/11 attacks from Guantánamo to New York for criminal trials. None of the principal figures in the financial collapse of 2008 have been prosecuted, much less convicted. But Holder has presided over an unprecedented series of prosecutions of alleged government leakers. These investigations included the seizure of the phone records of journalists, a practice he has agreed to reconsider. He has also engaged in a series of debilitating conflicts with Republicans in the House of Representatives, which culminated in a vote finding him in contempt of Congress, a first for an Attorney General.

Then, last June, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court declared a central part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Several states under Republican control immediately passed laws tightening the eligibility to vote, most notably by requiring voters to produce photo identification at the polls. Holder called these laws contemporary versions of poll taxes, designed, after Reconstruction, to disenfranchise African-Americans and immigrants. In August and September, the Justice Department sued Texas and North Carolina, alleging that their new limitations on the franchise violate one of the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Last month, Holder asked Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School and one of the leading voting-rights experts in the country, to direct the office that brought the lawsuits. Holder is finally on the offensive—with a case that is close to his heart.

Holder is wielding his unilateral power to bring cases in the name of the United States, but he is pressing his claims under a largely untested and controversial legal theory, and the cases may wind up before a Supreme Court that is very different from the one that delivered so many civil-rights victories in the nineteen-sixties. Holder told me that he will leave office sometime this year. The question is whether he will leave with a triumph or enable his adversaries to limit and restrict the laws that mean the most to him.

Holder is sometimes described as a career prosecutor, but he was a manager far longer than he was a trial lawyer; as such, he speaks with a bureaucrat’s caution rather than a litigator’s panache. Seated beneath the R.F.K. portrait, he expressed dismay that he had to deploy the Voting Rights Act nearly five decades after its original passage. “It’s disheartening to think that this is an issue that I have to devote significant amounts of time to, that we are filing lawsuits in the way that we are,” Holder told me in December. “We had a series of fifty-year anniversaries this year—all the great things that happened in 1963, among them being my sister-in-law’s integration of the University of Alabama.” On June 11th of that year, in one of the signature moments of the civil-rights movement, Katzenbach, then the Deputy Attorney General, and a team of federal marshals confronted Governor George Wallace at the doorway of the university’s Foster Auditorium. In spite of a court order demanding the admission of Vivian Malone and another African-American student, James Hood, Wallace prevented them from entering and registering. Later that day, President Kennedy placed the Alabama National Guard under federal control and directed it to escort Malone and Hood to the campus. Vivian Malone Jones graduated from the University of Alabama in 1965, and went on to pursue a long career in the federal government. She died in 2005, at the age of sixty-three. Katzenbach died in 2012, at ninety.

“It’s bothersome,” Holder went on. “But people should understand that there’s steel here, and I am resolved to oppose any attempts to try to roll back the clock in that way, to try to make it more difficult for people to exercise the most fundamental American right, which is the right to vote.”

Born in the Bronx sixty-three years ago, to parents whose families came from Barbados, Holder went to Stuyvesant High School and Columbia College, and graduated from Columbia Law School in 1976. He immediately joined the Justice Department, where he spent the next twelve years as a prosecutor in the public-integrity section. (In the nineteen-eighties, he was part of the team that prosecuted the Abscam case, the inspiration for “American Hustle.”) In 1988, Ronald Reagan appointed him to be a judge on the Superior Court of Washington, D.C., and five years later Bill Clinton tapped him to be the United States Attorney for D.C., where he focussed on street crime. In 1997, Clinton promoted him to Deputy Attorney General, where he served under Janet Reno, and ran the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department until 2001. Holder spent the George W. Bush years in private practice, at the law firm of Covington & Burling, and represented large corporations such as U.B.S., Chiquita Brands International, and the National Football League in the investigation into dog-fighting charges against the quarterback Michael Vick. When President Obama appointed him Attorney General, in 2009, he became the first African-American to hold the office. In the post-9/11 era, he found that national security took up much of his time.

Shelby County v. Holder concerned the two most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act, Sections 4 and 5. Section 4 created a formula, initially based on the results of the 1964 election, for identifying states and counties that had a history of discrimination against African-Americans. Through various reauthorizations of the law, discrimination against Latinos came to be covered as well, but the areas under supervision remained roughly the same—most of nine states, largely in the South, including the Alabama county that filed the case.

Section 5 decreed that the jurisdictions covered by Section 4 had to obtain permission before making any changes related to voting—a process that came to be called “preclearance.” Through preclearance, the covered districts had the burden of proving to the Justice Department (or to a federal court) that any changes they wanted to make—in everything from drawing legislative districts to determining the sites of polling places—would protect the rights of minority voters.

Since 1965, Congress has reauthorized the Voting Rights Act five times. In the course of the most recent process, in 2006, the House and the Senate held twenty-one hearings, questioned dozens of witnesses, and amassed a record of more than fifteen thousand pages. Congress concluded that, unless the law was reauthorized, “racial and language minority citizens will be deprived of the opportunity to exercise their right to vote, or will have their votes diluted, undermining the significant gains made by minorities in the last 40 years.” The vote to reauthorize the law was 98–0 in the Senate and 390–33 in the House, and the bill was signed by President Bush. Shelby County sued anyway, arguing that the formula for coverage was outdated and preclearance was unduly burdensome.

By a vote of five to four, in an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., the Court ruled that the preclearance process was now invalid. Roberts wrote that the manner of identifying covered jurisdictions under the Act was “based on decades-old data and eradicated practices.” He went on:

But history did not end in 1965. By the time the Act was reauthorized in 2006, there had been 40 more years of it. In assessing the “current need” for a preclearance system that treats States differently from one another today, that history cannot be ignored. During that time, largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased, and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.

The Constitution, Roberts said, “is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future.” Considering these changed circumstances, Roberts declared that Section 4, which defined the covered jurisdictions, was unconstitutional. He did not address Section 5 and the constitutionality of preclearance, but the issue was effectively moot. Because the law could no longer identify which states and counties were covered, Sections 4 and 5—the heart of the Act—were now void.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by the three other Democratic appointees to the Court, responded with a long and indignant dissenting opinion. “In the Court’s view, the very success of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act demands its dormancy,” she wrote. The Court should have respected the nearly unanimous judgment of Congress that the law would protect the electoral gains of minorities and prevent backsliding. Moreover, “the covered jurisdictions have a unique history of problems with racial discrimination in voting. Consideration of this long history, still in living memory, was altogether appropriate.” Ginsburg went on, “The Court criticizes Congress for failing to recognize that ‘history did not end in 1965.’ But the Court ignores that ‘what’s past is prologue.’ ”

Holder told me that he agreed with Ginsburg’s opinion. He said that Roberts’s decision “viewed the world as the Justices would like it to be but not the world as it is. I think Justice Ginsburg had it best when she talked about the fact that you have an umbrella in a rainstorm and that keeps you dry. The fact that you’re dry doesn’t mean there’s not a rainstorm. You take the umbrella down, and you get wet. And, if people didn’t believe that, you only have to see what the states did after Shelby County.”

Few states have undergone as profound a political transformation as North Carolina has in recent years. In the 2010 midterm elections, the North Carolina Senate and its House of Representatives went from Democratic to Republican control. At the time, the governor was Beverly Perdue, a Democrat, so neither party dominated. But Pat McCrory, a Republican, won the governorship in 2012, and the G.O.P. expanded its hold on both houses, to more than sixty per cent of the seats. At that point, the Republicans went on a legislative tear, ending benefits for the long-term unemployed, declining the expansion of Medicaid offered by the Affordable Care Act, and cutting taxes and government spending, especially for education. The Republican-led North Carolina legislature had passed a voter-identification bill when Perdue was governor, but she vetoed it, and the issue lay mostly dormant in the early months of full Republican control.

That all changed when the Supreme Court issued its Shelby County decision. Under the Voting Rights Act, forty of the hundred counties in North Carolina were covered jurisdictions, which meant that any statewide modifications in its voting law had been subject to preclearance. Now the state had the freedom to act without interference from Washington. Within a month of the decision, State Senator Bob Rucho expanded the voting-reform law from six parts in fourteen pages to sixty parts in fifty-seven pages. Rucho, a senior Republican, earned notoriety last year, when, after the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, he tweeted, “Justice Roberts’s pen & Obamacare has done more damage to the USA than the swords of the Nazis, Soviets & terrorists combined.” Among the provisions in Rucho’s proposed law were the elimination of same-day registration and a week of early voting; the end of pre-registration for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds; the end of straight party-ticket voting; the repeal of public-finance provisions for elections; an increase in maximum campaign contributions; and a strict voter-I.D. requirement that excluded student and public-employee identification cards as acceptable forms of proof.

In a hearing of the Rules Committee on July 23rd, State Senator Josh Stein, a Democrat, questioned Rucho about his bill’s provisions. He pointed out that in the past six state elections approximately thirty million votes had been cast in North Carolina elections, but there had been reports of only two incidents of in-person fraud at the polls. Stein asked, “What evidence of in-person voter fraud is compelling you to impose the I.D. requirement?”

“Senator Stein, you can’t live in this society without identification,” Rucho said. “No matter whether you go into buildings, whether you cash checks, whether you pay for your groceries with checks, whether you want to get on an airplane. Whatever it is, everyone has a form of voter I.D. . . . We are providing integrity and honesty in the system, and what that means is that confidence level will be instilled in the electoral process and therefore back in government, and that’s something we should all be striving for.” The proposed law, known as House Bill 589, passed both houses of the legislature, after a party-line vote, and on August 12th Governor McCrory signed it. In all, according to Rick Hasen, a prominent scholar at the University of California at Irvine and the proprietor of a leading election-law blog, North Carolina had passed “the most sweeping anti-voter law in at least decades.”

Requiring an I.D., as a way of combatting voter fraud, has become the signature controversy in the current political and legal conflict. In a speech to the N.A.A.C.P. in 2012, Holder inveighed against the practice. “Many of those without I.D.s would have to travel great distances to get them—and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them,” he said. “We call those poll taxes.” In a conversation with Holder, I brought up Rucho’s point: Demands for photo identification are now ubiquitous, so why should there be an exception where voting is concerned? (Polls show that requiring a photo I.D. is popular among voters of all parties.)

“Photo I.D.s are not per se bad,” Holder told me. “It’s a question of what you have to do to get one. If you look at Texas, if you have a photo I.D. that shows you are able to carry a concealed weapon, that’s O.K. If you have a photo I.D. that says you are a student at the University of Texas, that is not O.K. Now, what’s the difference? Both are government-issued. It tells me that there is certainly a political motive there.” (Like North Carolina, Texas tightened voting requirements after the Shelby County decision.) Holder noted that legislators in North Carolina imposed the photo-I.D. requirement even though a study by the state’s Board of Elections showed that African-Americans, who make up twenty-two per cent of the population, account for thirty-four per cent of registered voters lacking D.M.V.-issued identification. “And, nevertheless, even though you’ve got an official government agency telling you that this is what the problem is going to be, they go ahead,” he said.

In our conversations, Holder repeatedly described voter fraud as “nonexistent.” As Senator Stein noted, in North Carolina, in-person fraudulent voting is rarely detected. Still, according to Michael Carvin, a Washington lawyer who frequently represents Republicans in voting controversies, “no one finds voter fraud because most of the time no one ever looks. But every time there is a recount, and people actually check to see who voted, we inevitably find hundreds of illegally cast ballots. That’s a legitimate concern for the law to address.” As with many issues relating to voting, the underlying facts are unclear.

In any case, Holder saw the new laws in North Carolina and Texas as a refutation of the Court’s assertion that the Voting Rights Act was obsolete. “I think there’s a more fundamental question, and that’s whether or not there are still actions that are racially based or that have a racial impact,” Holder told me. “In 2013, there is still a factual basis for us to conclude that these attempts at photo-identification laws to combat nonexistent voter fraud are racially based, or, certainly, have a racial impact. One thing that’s different from 1965 is we’re not just talking about African-Americans—we’re talking about Latinos.”

The question remained what Holder (or the Department of Justice) could do about the laws in North Carolina and Texas. Had Sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act still been in effect, the laws could not have gone into operation without the approval of the Justice Department. Now Holder will have to convince a judge that these photo-I.D. laws are unconstitutional. In 2008, the Supreme Court, in a decision written by John Paul Stevens, upheld the photo-I.D. law in Indiana. “Holder’s argument is that photo I.D. is unconstitutional because people have to drive to pick up a government-issued I.D. that is free,” Carvin said. “But they have to drive to the polling place to vote, too. Is that unconstitutional as well? His argument appears to be that the Constitution requires states to have vote-by-mail with free stamps, or someone has to come to your house to let you vote.”

To try to undo the North Carolina and Texas laws, Holder turned to the last remaining tool available to him—Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 2 has a distinctive history. In 1980, the Supreme Court decided a case called City of Mobile v. Bolden, which considerably narrowed the previous definition of a constitutional violation of voting rights. According to that ruling, civil-rights plaintiffs could win these cases only if they proved that states or local communities intentionally violated the rights of minority voters. As Heather Gerken, a professor at Yale Law School, points out, “Back in the early days of the civil-rights movement, you really did have local officials saying they didn’t want African-Americans to vote. But that hasn’t been true for a long time, so it’s become very hard—maybe even impossible—to prove bad intent with smoking-gun evidence. All you can ever prove is discriminatory effects or results.” In response to Mobile v. Bolden, when the Voting Rights Act came up for renewal in 1982 the civil-rights community rallied in favor of a major change in Section 2. After a long debate, and a compromise engineered by Senators Ted Kennedy and Bob Dole, the revised Section 2 essentially overruled the Mobile v. Bolden decision and imposed an “effects” standard. In other words, the new version prohibited any voting practice that “results in a denial or abridgment” of the right to vote on account of race, regardless of the intent of the local authorities.

“Section 2 had a dramatic and immediate impact,” Samuel Issacharoff, a professor at New York University School of Law, told me. “Lots of cities and towns in the South and elsewhere created at-large voting systems, instead of district representation, so that blacks were always outnumbered and could never win. Civil-rights groups, as well as the government, were allowed to sue under the new Section 2, and they went around the country filing cases that effectively wiped out those systems. At-large city councils more or less disappeared. The law was a big success.”

In the lawsuits filed against Texas, on August 22nd, and North Carolina, on September 30th, the Justice Department asserted that Section 2 prohibited the states’ imposition of the photo-I.D. requirement and other changes contained in the new laws. Until then, Section 2 had mostly been used to overturn districting schemes, not ballot-access rules, but it is at least plausible that requiring a photo I.D. could “result” in a denial or an abridgment of the right to vote.

The problems with the Justice Department’s theory begin with the simple question of proof. To make its case, the Department employs largely statistical arguments. Each change in the law, the federal complaint asserts, hurts African-American voters. The complaint states:

African-Americans disproportionately utilized early voting during the November 2008 and November 2012 general elections in North Carolina. African-Americans also disproportionately used the—now eliminated—first seven days of early voting during these elections.

Likewise, African-Americans took greater advantage of same-day voter registration. And, as Holder noted, African-Americans tend to have less access to acceptable forms of photo identification than white citizens do. All of this, the Justice Department asserts, amounts to a violation of Section 2.

The courts may be skeptical of these claims, which are largely based on assumptions of what will happen when the laws take full effect. “Republicans are more likely to win low-turnout elections. Democrats are more likely to win high-turnout elections—everyone knows that at this point,” Issacharoff said. “And the laws in Texas and North Carolina are certainly aimed at reducing turnout. But if they reduce turnout for everyone, not just African-Americans, it’s not clear whether that violates the Voting Rights Act.” The evidence regarding photo I.D.s appears ambiguous as well. “No one has good numbers yet on photo I.D.,” Heather Gerken said. “It may be that the impact is not as great as the general public thinks.” According to Michael Carvin, the Republican lawyer, Holder’s theory will not stand up. “North Carolina went from seventeen to ten days of early voting, and he says that’s against the law,” Carvin told me. “New York has zero days of early voting, and no one says their system violates the Voting Rights Act. The point is that blacks in North Carolina have exactly the same chance to vote as whites.”

Supporters of North Carolina’s H.B. 589 insist that the courts will find no discriminatory intent or effect of the law in practice. “It is not intended to limit voting. The intent was to finally get a little bit of security in voting,” said Susan Myrick, the elections-policy analyst at the Civitas Institute, a conservative public-policy group that developed ideas adopted by the new Republican majority in North Carolina. Myrick went on, “If you look at what happened in Georgia, which is similar demographically to North Carolina, after they added a photo-I.D. requirement you see that there was no discriminatory effect.” (As in North Carolina, the precise impact of the photo-I.D. requirement in Georgia remains unclear.)

The political impact of photo-I.D. requirements may be more complex than it first appears. In North Carolina, as in other states where Republicans have been pushing photo-I.D. and similar laws, Democrats have used the issue to rally their base, especially African-Americans, which may have increased their numbers at the polls. And it is true that in the 2012 election, before H.B. 589 went into effect, African-Americans turned out at a higher rate than whites. And so, paradoxically, these anti-fraud laws may wind up increasing the voting power of African-Americans. In any case, it is far from clear that the Justice Department will be able to prove to the satisfaction of a federal court that the North Carolina reforms “result” in discrimination against African-Americans.

There is another ominous possibility for Holder’s voting-rights crusade. Instead of losing in federal district court, he may win. If the Department of Justice prevails in its trials against North Carolina and Texas, the case almost certainly will be appealed to the Supreme Court, where Holder’s agenda may truly be in peril.

Chief Justice Roberts has never publicly articulated his ultimate goals for civil-rights laws, but many lawyers who follow the Court—especially Roberts’s ideological foes—have definite ideas about the direction in which he wants to take the law. They believe that Roberts wants to get rid of all “effects” tests—in affirmative action, in school integration, and in voting rights. Pamela Karlan, an outspoken liberal, has been a relentless critic of the current Supreme Court. She wrote recently, “The Roberts Court’s skepticism of the political branches and federal power maps disturbingly onto the contemporary conservative agenda.”

In one of Roberts’s early civil-rights opinions as Chief Justice, a 2007 case in which he struck down the school-integration program in Seattle, he used a formulation that sums up his approach: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Roberts appears to believe in what’s often called a “color-blind Constitution.” In rough terms, he believes that the Constitution prohibits the consideration of race as a factor—in, say, admission to college or being hired for a government job. What others call affirmative action Roberts calls a form of discrimination.

That attitude extends to voting rights. In a 2006 case concerning the boundaries of legislative districts in Texas, Roberts wrote a separate opinion, which stated, in unusually direct terms, that he found any consideration of race by government distasteful. “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” he wrote. Roberts has made it clear that he feels that intentional discrimination should be illegal, but he has expressed reservations about any other kind of government redress based on statistics or history. “There is no question that the conservatives on the Supreme Court are on the hunt for the effects test,” Heather Gerken said. “They are concerned about laws that purport to address the current effects of past discrimination. They think of a lot of these laws as racial entitlements.”

Holder’s calculation is a familiar one for civil-rights advocates in a conservative era: accept a less than desirable status quo or risk a long-term setback from the Supreme Court, which might send Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to join Sections 4 and 5 in oblivion. “They are tough cases, the ones that we are about to try,” Holder told me. “I expect that we’ll win these cases in Texas and North Carolina. But it’s made more difficult by the way in which the Court has eviscerated the Voting Rights Act.” Still, he’s proceeding. “Getting back to Justice Ginsburg, she talked about what we faced in 1965 being kind of the first-generation barriers,” Holder said. “And I think what we’re dealing with now, as she said, are kind of second-generation barriers to voting rights. It’s not a question of poll taxes and trying to figure out how many bubbles there are in a bar of soap.” (Before the Voting Rights Act, Southern registrars were known to demand that African-Americans answer absurd questions.) “We’re dealing with sophisticated requirements for photo I.D. to combat a nonexistent voter fraud. It’s different, but there are nevertheless barriers to voting that can be dealt with under the Voting Rights Act as it now exists.”

In January, a group of members of Congress introduced a series of amendments to the Voting Rights Act, in an effort to resurrect, in somewhat different form, the provisions the Court rejected. In the same vein, a Presidential commission proposed a series of reforms designed to modernize and streamline the process of registering to vote and casting ballots. According to the bipartisan proposal, the covered jurisdictions would no longer be determined by the 1964 election results but, rather, by a pattern of more recent election-law violations. Any jurisdiction, in any part of the country, with three violations in fifteen years would be subject to Justice Department preclearance. Examples of such violations might range from racially biased redistricting to moving polling places out of minority neighborhoods. “It makes the Voting Rights Act of national application, not just targeted at some parts of the country,” James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican who is the principal sponsor of the amendment in the House, told me. In today’s polarized political environment, the bill’s chances of passage in either the House or the Senate, let alone both, look remote. As Sensenbrenner acknowledges, few Republicans in the House have shown enthusiasm for the bill, and Holder’s lawsuits further poisoned the well with them. “Republicans already think they are picked on by Holder,” Sensenbrenner told me. “And now, as a result of these lawsuits, we can pretty much write off getting any Republican votes in North Carolina or Texas.” Republican leaders in the House have made no promises about when, or if, they will allow the bill to come up for a vote. In the Senate, the principal sponsor is Patrick Leahy, a Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Committee; he has yet to entice a single Republican senator to join him as a co-sponsor, which suggests a steep climb to reach a filibuster-proof sixty votes. “I’m watching the clock and I’m getting a little worried,” Leahy told me.

So Holder is pressing forward under the current iteration of the Voting Rights Act, with all its limitations. His recent personnel choices reflect his priorities. In addition to Karlan, whose post does not require Senate confirmation, President Obama nominated Debo Adegbile to be Assistant Attorney General in charge of the civil-rights division, and thus Karlan’s boss. Adegbile, formerly a prominent litigator for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund (which was founded and led by Thurgood Marshall), is also an experienced voting-rights litigator. He faces considerable Republican opposition in the Senate, but, thanks to the invocation of the “nuclear option” by Senate Democrats, which limits filibusters, he will probably be confirmed soon. Holder told me that he’s planning to remain Attorney General “well into” 2014. His lame-duck status works as a kind of liberation for him. “Eric’s indignation and his zeal is one hundred per cent genuine on this issue,” Reid Weingarten, a prominent Washington lawyer who worked with Holder at the Justice Department in the seventies and eighties and remains a close friend, told me. “We did voter-fraud cases in those cases, and he knows what real fraud is. And he knows that what the Republicans are saying about fraud is make-believe. He is happy to fight them on this issue.”

Holder recognizes that many see his own appointment as evidence that the civil-rights movement has accomplished its goals and should, as the Supreme Court suggested of the Voting Rights Act, recede into history. “The world certainly has changed,” he told me. “The fact that I’m sitting here and talking to you as an African-American Attorney General is an indication that our nation is in a fundamentally different place than it was a hundred and fifty years ago, fifty years ago. But we’re not at the place yet where we want to be. And racial discrimination is still something that is, unfortunately, a part of the American existence, and it rears its head in places that are particularly odious.” Five decades ago, the opposition to Kennedy and Katzenbach came largely from within the Democratic Party, notably its Southern wing. “You look at the ’64 Civil Rights Act, ’65 Voting Rights Act—it’s interesting that, but for Republican involvement, there probably would not have been passage of those acts. After that, the Act was reauthorized by overwhelming bipartisan majorities, and, again, signed by Republican Presidents. This is different. We’re in a different environment now.”

Holder can’t control today’s conservative environment, but he can choose how he will end his tenure as Attorney General. “This comes down, in some ways, to a fundamental question of who we are—who we are as a people,” he said. “The history of this nation has always been to try to expand the franchise. Whether it’s freed slaves, women, young people, we’ve always found ways to make it easier to vote. We’ve always found ways in which we’ve made the voting process more inclusive. What these folks are intending to do, or certainly the impact of what they’re going to do, is to turn their backs on that history. To turn our backs on that history is inconsistent with who we say we are as a nation.” ♦